Washington, DC - Shaun Dakin, CEO The National Political Do Not Contact Registry - Sign up for free at StopPoliticalCalls.org
Update: Good article in the Washington Post today. Click here to read.
I've been following this story for a few months now. To remind you:
- The House held hearings in July about "deep packet inspection (DPI)" - a technique to essentially spy on your every move online so that marketers can deliver the right ad at the right time to the right person.
- Then in August the same Committee sent a letter to the top 30 telecommunications companies in the country demanding that they report back on DPI.
- Under pressure, the CEO of the main DPI company, NebuAd, resigned today.
More is at this link in Wired's Threat Level Blog. Below are some good excerpts from the article.
My perspective is the same that it has always been. Here is what I wrote in August.
My question is this: What are politicians doing to give consumers / voters the ability to opt out of communications and tracking by politicians?
What online activities are political candidates tracking without voter's permission?
My guess is that most politicians are clueless. (See McCain's comments about the internet and his computer use). However, the biggest and most well financed candidates are essentially medium sized corporations with millions of dollars to spend on marketing, targetting, online activies, and any number of activities that track and market to voters.
So, will Obama give voters the right to opt out of his online marketing?
Will McCain?
If their reaction to the Federal Do Not Call list is any indication of their thinking, I would think not.
From the Wired Article:
Online privacy scored a small victory this week as the CEO for controversial net eavesdropping firm NebuAD resigned just months after Congress successfully scared the country's ISPs into abandoning dreams of windfall profits from tracking their customers around the web.
Dykes's resignation can best be understood as the death -- if only temporary one -- of a scheme to track online users' every click and search in order to serve just the right ad at the right time - a service that companies will pay a premium for.
NebuAd's business model was to pay ISPs to let it install equipment to monitor where people surfed and what they searched on, in order to deliver targeted ads based on the user's profile. ISPs hungry to be more than just a railroad company warmed to the idea of new revenue.
But after one of the nation's largest ISPs, Charter Communication, announced plans to test NebuAd technology, the House Energy and Commerce committee became very interested whether tracking people's every move on the net violated federal law. The inquiry dealt a critical blow to the company, since it quickly became apparent that no ISP was going to take on a powerful House telecom committee to defend untested and clearly creepy technology.
Washington, DC - Shaun Dakin, CEO The National Political Do Not Contact Registry - Sign up for free at StopPoliticalCalls.org
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